Chapter 100: Professionals

A double row of twenty soldiers pushed forward against a discordant mob of twisted wretches. Each man was equipped with a large round shield and a spear and all were fully armored in plated mail and surcoats. The men worked together, pushing forward against the horde, the first row creating a wall of shields while the second row behind freely stabbed at the demons with their long spears. They did not march in just a simple straight line, either; the soldiers curved their rows so that the ends were further forward than the middle, scooping the demons like a bowl. As they marched forward inexorably and the demons fell in ones and twos, their corrupted numbers dwindling in the face of the persistent onslaught, the second row of men spread out, lengthening the curved line until eventually the ends met and the soldiers had encircled the remaining wretches completely. By then, the end result was guaranteed. It was only a matter of time.

Not that the soldiers finished the battle without taking casualties of their own. The demons, while wild and uncoordinated in their attacks, were both strong and vicious. They struck at the shield-wielding men before them with blind fury, their stolen weapons biting deep into wood and sometimes making it through far enough to hit the arms or bodies of the soldiers. There were caustic spell-casters among the wretches as well. Streams of acidic gunk were sprayed onto the soldiers, biting into their shields and armor. At least one man went down screaming as he received a blast of yellow-green bile to the face, his sallet helmet only able to do so much to protect him.

Still, the gap the man left behind was closed immediately by the other men and no demon escaped the encircling line of soldiers. The efficient slaughter continued until no wretch was left alive.

Jadis watched the battle with interest from her perch on a hill overlooking the sloped valley. Her only experience watching mercenaries fight so far had been during the wagon-ride that had first taken her to Felsen. Four mercenary guards defending against an overwhelming ambush wasn’t exactly the best example of what a trained group of soldiers could do. She supposed she’d also seen her eight-man escort in battle as well, but that was still a far cry different from the battle being enacted before her now.

Seeing the mercenaries methodically take the wretches apart while taking relatively few wounds of their own, Jadis could appreciate their combat method. The man who had taken acid to the face was their worst injured and from what she could see, now that the fight was over, he was already being treated by his comrades with healing potions. There was definitely something to be said for working in a large group of well-trained soldiers.

The numbers did help explain why it took so long for people in mercenary companies to level, though. The experience spread between twenty soldiers had to be miserably low, even if they were killing off an equal number of demons. Jadis didn’t think she could ever settle for working in so large a group, slowing her progress to a crawl compared to her current leveling speed.

One point that watching the soldiers do their work had highlighted was the simple fact that Jadis was not a trained combatant. She was strong and durable and had a natural talent for thinking fast in battle and using her strengths to exploit her enemies’ weaknesses. She also had the supernatural synchronization that came from being one person in three bodies and could leverage that advantage well in combat. What she didn’t have was military training. Watching the coordinated attacks of the mercenary soldiers as they fought was an eye-opening reminder for Jadis. Where she swung her weapons instinctually, those soldiers attacked with the precision that came from years of drills and experienced instruction.

It was no wonder she’d been offered a barbarian class. Her wild strikes were closer in nature to the demons than the soldiers. The only real difference between her style and the wretches was the strength and speed of her movements.

“It doesn’t look like they’ll need any help from us,” Aila stated, breaking into Jadis’ thoughts. “Shall we move on?”

“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Jay said with a shake of her head.

She, Aila, Eir, and the eight guards escorting them came down off the overlooking hill, heading in a generally northward direction. They kept off the road that would lead them to the fort where Jadis had first met Aila, but they weren’t too far off from that same path.

The battle they’d just witnessed had not been the first they’d come across that afternoon. It seemed there were soldiers everywhere, the hills surrounding Felsen overcrowded with mercenary companies set on searching out every demon they could possibly find. That wasn’t to say Jadis hadn’t been able to track down her own quarry. An hour into their trek into the hills she’d found a roving band of wretches a dozen strong to fight, putting them down quickly with Aila’s help. It had been four hours now, though, and that one mob of demons was all they had been able to hunt for themselves, leaving Jadis with a niggling sense of frustration.

That fact that she’d been able to find a lone band of demons despite the huge number of mercenaries combing the hills did speak volumes about the seriousness of the situation out in the hills. Somehow demons were getting past the defensive line cordoning off the Broken Hills from the Great Southern Forest. There were, according to Aila, thousands of soldiers stationed in dozens of forts all along that border, stretching across an area that would take weeks to travel. There were constant patrols going between the forts that were meant to catch any demons that tried to make their way south. There were always some that made it through, but never to this extent and certainly not unnoticed.

The wretches were a local problem, but they had been a dwindling one. The demon matriarch that had been spawning them had been slain months prior and they should have been down to their last dregs. But here they were, in numbers great enough to be a threat to hundreds of mercenaries sweeping the area. Where were they all coming from?

The answer wasn’t necessarily Jadis’ business to figure out. She wasn’t a part of the military or a mercenary company hired to clear Weigrun of demons. She was an independent mercenary with no true obligations beyond her own personal goals. That being said, Jadis couldn’t help but worry that her arrival on Oros had some connection to the sudden resurgence of demon activity that had been on the decline.

Maybe it was self-centered of her, but she was personally sent by a literal god to act as a balance-changer in the fight between the armies of two other gods. What if Samleos, God of the demons, had figured out something was up, or even knew directly of her existence, and was directing his demonic followers to put a stop to the interference before she could affect much change? It was a possibility, she supposed, but how likely was it that a god would be sending his forces directly after her as opposed to her just getting caught up in the ebb and flow of an ongoing struggle?

Ultimately, she supposed it didn’t matter too much. There wasn’t anything she could do about being targeted by Samleos if she was, and if she wasn’t then it didn’t matter regardless. All she could really do for now was what she was already doing. She had to keep growing stronger.

By the time the summer sun had reached the point in the sky where Jadis had to consider turning back so that her group could make it back to the city before nightfall, they hadn’t accomplished much more than they had in the first hour. Scenes of battles recently fought were common, and she found more active battles as well, but she only got involved in one such encounter where it looked like the group of mercenaries were getting overwhelmed by a horde of bramble fiends and bone thieves attacking together. Once she and Aila had scythed into them from the side, the demons had fallen quickly. She doubted she’d gotten much experience from the battle, either, since even Aila’s still low-level arcanist class didn’t get a level up from the effort.

“We’ll have to range further out to find more demon clusters, I think,” Syd told Aila as she carried her in her arms, jogging along at a speed matched by her escort’s horses. “Maybe even camp out in the wilds for multi-day trips.”

“Agreed,” Aila said, her arm wrapped around Syd’s neck. “It’s good that we already commissioned that wagon from Sabina. Once that’s finished, we can go on true expeditions into the forests. But there’s no reason we can’t camp in the normal fashion in the meantime. The inn is nice, but we don’t need to come back to the city every night.”

There was the question of the guard escort, of course, but that was Vraekae’s problem, not hers. If the magistrate was going to insist on sending them every time she left the city, then they’d have to be prepared to rough it out in the hills and forests just like her.

“Miss Dys?” Eir spoke up from her seat on her horse, catching Jadis’ attention. She’d even addressed the correct body. “I thought you should know; I can hear the sounds of battle coming from that direction,” she pointed to the west.

Ealdread, the elven guard in charge of her escort, also seemed to have picked up on the sounds of battle. His pointed ears had perked up as he looked in that direction.

Jadis couldn’t hear anything over the sounds of the horses, but if the sharp-eared elves were telling her that there was a fight going on nearby, she believed them. They’d been right every time before so far.

“Let’s check it out,” Dys called out, making sure to be heard by all the guards.

Chances were good it would just be another mercenary squad putting down another group of wretches, but there was always the chance the mercs could be in need of some backup. It wasn’t her goal, but there was no reason not to help any soldiers she came across out.

Course altered, Jadis picked up speed and sprinted to the west, her escort following behind.

It didn’t take long for Jadis to get close enough to the commotion for her to hear what Eir and Ealdread were hearing. As they rounded a hill, the sound of boulders crashing against boulders resounded, echoing in the evening air. The shouts of men and women and the clatter of steel against bone could be heard as well. Jadis put on the speed, pushing herself harder to reach what sounded like a pitched battle involving at least one grundwyrm and bone thieves. Just as she reached the edge of the next hill, a fiery explosion lit up the long shadows of the hills, a palpable wave of heat washing over her as a massive plume of smoke rose into the air.

Jadis’ three selves skidded to a halt in the face of the unexpected blast.

“The fuck was that!?” she shouted in unison.

Aila had yelped at Jadis’ sudden stop but recovered a moment later. “That had to be a wizard’s spell. Probably a powerful, high-level caster.”

If that explosion had been a wizard’s work, Jadis didn’t wonder why Aila had always dreamt of being one. It was as though a bomb had just gone off, one big enough to take down a building.

Hearing her guard escort closing in, Jadis got back in motion and rounded the hill, finally catching sight of the explosive battle she’d been hearing. The sight that greeted her was something out of a fantasy nerd’s dream.

There were two grundwyrms attacking a band of mercenaries, with dozens of bone thieves and many times that number of bramble fiends launching themselves at their foes. A literal crater on one side of the valley was littered with the burnt bodies of more fiends and thieves. Crawling away from the crater was a monster Jadis had never seen before but sent a shudder up her spine.

It had been burnt badly from the explosion, but the huge creature was unmistakably spider-like in its form. With ten long, spiked legs radiating from a bulbous black core, it limped along, mangled but not out of the fight.

The demons were only half of the battlefield, though. The thirty mercenaries fighting them were a sight to behold.

Many were kitted out in heavy plate armor but they had a far less uniform look to them than the other mercenary companies Jadis had seen throughout the day. Not all held shields, not all used spears, and several had wildly different armor styles from the rest. One thing they all had in common was the symbol of a red wolf on a black field painted on their shields or dyed onto their armor or surcoats. Several of the mercenaries stood out to her as she briefly watched them battle, but one in particular drew her attention above all others.

A pale blue elf wearing red and black robes hovered forty feet in the air, a disk made of flames under his feet. Fire wreathed across his body as he chanted a deep, thrumming litany of incomprehensible words. As he channeled his spell, one of the grundwyrms hurled a boulder as big as a man at the wizard and, with a wave of his gnarled wooden staff, the stone projectile was blown away, crashing harmlessly into the open ground away from his line of allies. Not even for a moment did his chanting cease as he casually knocked away a rock that could have crushed a car.

As eye catching as the fire wizard was, he wasn’t the only combatant to grab Jadis’ attention. She had seen on her first day in Felsen a man who was unmistakably an orc, though he’d looked closer to a green-skinned Santa than a fearsome warrior. The man who tore through bone thieves like paper in front of her now was everything that first orc was not.

Huge and muscled like an unregulated body builder, the orc wore no armor and seemed to not need any either. Bone claws and bramble vines slashed uselessly against his dark green skin, not even scratching the raging beast of a man. His head was shaved bald but a thick braided beard on his tusked face gave him the look of a Viking war god. He swung an axe with a head the size of most shields in wide arcs around him, cleaving through each demon unfortunate enough to get in his way as easily as though they were made of candlewax. Even his allies gave him a wide berth, staying clear of his attacks as he bellowed joyously with each swing.

 Finally, there was a true knight in shining armor taking on one of the grundwyrms single-handedly. Despite being no taller than any other man on the battlefield, when the giant stone demon swung its arm down on him, he somehow rebuffed the blow with his kite shield, not falling back even an inch. His bastard sword glowed brilliantly with crackling energy and, as he struck a blow against the side of the wyrm, a burst of lightning exploded with the impact, shearing off a huge chunk of the grundwyrm’s rocky defenses. In the blink of an eye, the knight had made the same attack twice more, breaking down the demon into chunks and pieces.

Jadis was stunned to inaction for a brief moment, caught up in the glorious sight of truly powerful combatants destroying demons on a scale she couldn’t hope to match. Eventually, a response to the situation did come to her and she voiced it in her typically eloquent fashion.

“That’s so fucking badass.”

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